September 1, 2012

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD GETS RID OF COMMENTS ON HIS BLOG: “To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.”

I toy with the idea of opening comments now and then, but the above has always been my feeling, too.

Mead announces the end of comments effective immediately. No comments on the end of comments. I think he should have had one more comments thread on that post. The previous post, the last post with comments, is saying that the blog hit a new traffic record. That got 11 comments. 11 comments! Is it really that hard to "edit and curate"?

I like Instapundit as it is, without comments, mostly because it's all about sending people to other blogs, so all the other blogs stand in for comments. But if you're not a blog that's about linking to a lot of other people, it feels like there ought to be comments. Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to. I don't know. I love the comments section around here.

128 comments:

Part of the fun of a blog is the comments. Even the insane and odious ones. Ann most of your commenters are very bright people, not that I always agree with them but even the ones I disagree with are bright albeit IMHO wrong. However there is one particular commenter that is a rather bigoted......

I thought you were starting to get frustrated by the comments a couple of weeks ago. Which I wouldn't blame you for if you did. As an infrequent commenter at all the blogs I visit, my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. But I usually read a lot of them, even whem I'm just lurking.

I'd like to know, as I'm not a blogger, what exactly happens when one feels an obligation to 'edit and curate.' Can't you just let 'er rip, other than basic anti-spam measures? Does Mr. Meade read and decide the fate of every comment here, or just let people say what they're going to say?

The only blog without comments that I read regularly is Instapundit. I like reading the conversation and the varying points of view. It seems a bit presumptuous to think that the blogger's voice alone should be satisfying or that the experience wouldn't be improved by the salon-style atmosphere that develops with a good comments section.

It sometimes drives me crazy that I can't comment on Instapundit, but I know it wouldn't be the same read if it had comments. No offense, Ann, but I probably wouldn't come here any more if you got rid of comments. Your posts are but Rorschach blots for us, your commenters, to reveal our manifold psychopathologies. Everybody except PaddyO, anyway.

"I'd like to know, as I'm not a blogger, what exactly happens when one feels an obligation to 'edit and curate.' Can't you just let 'er rip, other than basic anti-spam measures? Does Mr. Meade read and decide the fate of every comment here, or just let people say what they're going to say?"

It's mostly me reading comments and deleting a few things to control the "bad faith" problem described in the instructions.

We had a huge problem a while back, which led to this separate discussion page, and Meade worked with a lot of people who were being inappropriate, cluttering up the comments with stuff that was driving better commenters away.

Meade reads many of the comments too, and he deals with email from people who want explanations about why they've been deleted or who want to argue that somebody needs deletion.

We're mostly freewheeling here, but that can't be the only policy, because there will be some people who abuse the welcome, and we think these are people who basically just hate me and want to ruin the blog. We're not going to sit back and let them do that.

Mead and/or his assistants ran a pretty tight comment ship. The blog was moderated such that each comment had to be approved before it appeared and the delay was usually a few hours or more. Mead himself rarely replied in the comments thread.

So there wasn't much conversation in the comments. It was mostly a string of people walking up to the mic to get whatever it was off their chest then going back to sit down.

Mead was also prolific. He posted several articles a day and they were meaty think pieces. Seems to me it was the writing that he cared about, not the blogging.

If you are coming to campaign in Tampa, stop by my "The Pizza Guy" (based on the Fast Times, with Sean Penn in Mr. Hand's classroom episode). I had it before 2008 in CT. Now it will be FL. Today I left the Obama campaign after working for it from Summer 2008 (to Summer 2012). What tipped? The Clint Eastwood talk. He is my hero. When he said that if you do not do your job, you are to let go, and that I - yes, I - own America. I realized that the POTUS cannot be an empty chair. Since that night, I cannot get that image out of my head (Obama == empty chair == not reporting to work as not knowing how to do work). I left him. No words necessary between me and David P., David A., and Jim M. I just checked out.

I was disappointed when Commentary axed its comment sections (O the irony!) several years back. As I understand it, several commenters were constantly pushing the envelope with not very subtle antisemitism.

I think the proximate cause was the election. More traffic, more insanity. Mead doesn't want to have a partisan blog.

I don't think Mead is really comfortable with this whole internet thing, even though it's given him a second chance at mass publicity. His books were out of print before his blog took off (I remember trying to get a copy of "Special Providence" a few years ago. BTW, that's a great book.

It's also really odd that WRM is so much more successful as a conservative than as a liberal (and yes, that's what he is now). Perhaps there's too much competition on the left for the sort of commentary he was providing. He's kind of a Tom Friedman, explainer type. Without a big media gig, the internet was all there was, and he did a good job with it.

I enjoy the comments here much more than any place else on the Internet. It is the most diverse and interesting of the comment sections, and I include such sites as The New Republic, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and even The New Engand Journal of Medicine. Most comment sections end up being echo chambers of the same point of view. At some of them, it feels like you are reading commentary from those two old guys in the box seats on the Muppet Show. But here, it is often thoughtful, and always entertaining. May your comment section always remain open.

Thank you for the explanation, Professor, and for your attention toward curating the quality of the discussion. {Although, after reading a bit of the page you linked, I'm a bit leery of saying that lest I come across as a suckup. I'll refrain from making appreciative comments about anyone for a while now. :) }

Ann - I think that if you were to eliminate comments, I would likely stray away (and some here might think that a good thing). The only non-comment "blogs" I routinely follow are Instapundit and Drudge. What most makes this a desirable blog for me is the commenting. You (Ann) throw something out, and everyone starts in. And, you do a good job of being an instigator.

Joke! It's just that I'm amazed how many people are making hummingbird feeders on etsy. Thirteen pages of them. Mostly bottles. But people are concerned about the spouts too. People make flowers for the spouts. I'm impressed. It warms my heart to learn so many people love those little birds.

There's one glass blower I noticed on etsy who is making them a little too big but at incredibly low price. I bet I could contact them and arrange for feeders 1/3 normal size. The ideas people come up with are amazing.

I wish there were just a little less pointless chattering. That ebbs and flows, of course, but I think it's useful to remember that there's a difference between a comments section and a chat room.

When I see people making literally dozens and dozens of comments in a single thread I think:

1. How do you have the time to do this for hours?

2. Why are you wasting your precious time doing this for hours, if you're not making new, substantive and interesting points?

3. SHUT UP, ALREADY! I hate scrolling through a 75 comment tennis match between (not to single people out) Bender and Allie or Jay and Allie or anyone and Allie.

But who am I to complain? Bad patches come and go. Irritating commenters come and go. I've been here since (I think) November 6th, 2005 at 2:23 PM, whereupon I slagged on the Beats. There's a unique chemistry involving Althouse's writing and the better commenters here (past and present) that have kept me reading and writing these (nearly) 7 years.

Wait a second, I thought all I was doing was revealing my pyschopathologies. Now I can't?

Anyhoo, I like the comments here because they're full of usually good arguments and discussions that help me sketch out my thoughts and see what others are sketching. It's great. Plus, I spend my time in academia, and am looking for jobs there, so I have to keep a very tight control over my political statements. Which isn't a bad thing, as it keeps me focused on what I should be focused on, but this place has been amazing to say what I'm thinking, riff off what others are thinking, and otherwise let off steam.

Thanks for this place. I go to instapundit as well, but this is the only place I comment at anymore, pretty much the only blog I regularly visit.

I was not impressed. They were "Amy's" brand; too expensive, too pretend fancy, bland, meatless. What I really wanted was a cheap, old-fashioned frozen pizza that seemed proud of the fact that it was both frozen and machine-made. It's getting more difficult to find such products.

I did, however, find ice cream sandwiches, 6 for 2.99, made with emulsifiers and fake vanilla and all manner of other horrors. But that's exactly what I wanted. They were wonderful!

I knew an old-timer in a remote part of Alaska who delighted in feeding the hummingbirds. They migrated almost nine thousand miles each way to and from southern Chile (and boy were their wings tired). Anyway, one fall he had a whole gallon of sugar syrup left over which he stuck in the pantry for the winter. When spring rolled around he used it to fill up the feeder, as usual. In the afternoon of the first day he checked his feeder, only to find about ten of the little critters on the ground, apparently dead. But then, one by one, they got up and unsteadily flew away-- with massive hangovers-- because the syrup had spent the winter fermenting.

I think editing and curating are different things. Weeding out is yet another different thing. There are other distinctions as well.

Perhaps the potential ball[s] of yarn[s] from an anticipated tangled mass all over the room did not seem worth the untangling and then reconnecting. Who knows? There's no accounting for preference (and, often enough, worth-the-time ability) after all, now, is there?

More and better liberals please. We need someone to explain how that shit works and why anyone would want to live in such a world. Hell, I could be wrong about everything, and I got nobody to teach me gooder around here.

Palladian: Heh! Love that comment. It's all about "be what you are/things should be what they are and neither engage in pretense to bother otherwise or engage in silly pretensions." Isn't it? Or did I get that wrong?

I've tried all the frozen pizzas around here, one by one, and my favorite is California Pizza Kitchen - thin crusts, better quality ingredients, no nastiness, they cook well. There are others that are also good, and there are a few brands out there that are really not human food, and should be sold at Home Depot.

"Paddy, I only meant to say I think you are about the sanest one here."

Oh, that's nice, then. Thanks! Though, truth be told, I am the one who in my mid-30s thoughts a PhD in theology of all things was a good career move, so I'm not sure that's entirely sane. Few people are across the board sane in every area of life.

And thanks, wyo sis for your kind words.

I went looking to see if I could find my first comment. No idea. I know I started reading Althouse in the election coverage of 2004, but comments weren't open then, it seems, and I can't find when I first made one.

I did, however, find the very interesting post in which Althouse turned on the comments welcome sign. Seems we have Judge Posner to thank for it.

First, there are enough commenters that it's not the same people saying the same things every day. Second, there's not so many that you can't get to recognize some of them. Third, our hostess is somewhat liberal, and attracts commenters who are mostly somewhat conservative. This keeps it from being an echo chamber. Fourth, our hostess is experienced in getting people to discuss things in her professional life.

There are a couple of other places I will frequent but none so good as this, for commenting.

I always say to my friends, I'm not a member of a group, the groups are members of me.

This is why you became and are eye-catching to me, Palladian, and why--no matter whether you have irritated me at times (and no matter that I do, in fact, after years of exposure, profoundly disagree with some of your music/musician etc., in particular, judgments) or not--I will always give attention to what you say and think about it.

There are lots of good liberals around here— like me, for example. The problem is that the definition of liberalism in the United States has drifted from the "classical" liberalism of Locke, many of the Founders, Adam Smith, Hayek, Friedman, et al, to the post-New Deal, social welfare/socialist "progressivism".

There's a chance to keep the blogger honest. It's harder to get away with a lie or spin. Someone who maybe agrees with you links to you, and the people who follow that link may read the comments and see that you got called out and how you responded to it.

It's not as passive as reading the news or an opinion column.

If you're lucky there is a community you can feel a part of.

The cons of blogs that allow comments:

Trolls and griefers who just want to bust things up.

Mobys who will try to discredit you by putting something inflammatory in the comments and calling the attention of others to it.

Poes who are inflammatory, and possibly sincere--no one can tell.

Spam.

Groupthink. It affects blogs with smaller pools of commenters than this one, I think. I know that there are people who think this blog is monolithic but I think that says more about their views than the views of the commenters here.

Drama. Much smaller blogs than this one, I think, are more susceptible. It's like griefing or trolling but everyone involved means it.

Full disclosure: I didn't read all the comments on this post before posting mine. (There was a time where that would have been entirely unthinkable. Then there was a time when it was somewhat thinkable, sometimes, but times were hard then. And then... and then ... well, then, you get my drift. Often enough, since then, it's been a down-slide, though not ALWAYS.) The page for the comment on the post took me to the comment place and then I scrolled up until just after a couple of things caught my eye.

Now, I realize, I should have started from the very top, as I did from days of yore.

I mean, that song is right up there along with "living freely through writing," as an enlivening undercurrent, is it not?

Not that there weren't and aren't other things, like art and photography and politics and Bob Dylan and squirrels and even "squism," for example. And sometimes even food and sometimes even friends! If you know what I mean.

Oh good grief, is that some new kind of new putdown like damning with huge damn? No, no, a thousand time no! Mead is an actual explainer (that's "explainer-explainer" to you Whoopi fans), not a gaseous name-dropper and serial metaphor-abuser.

"even the ones I disagree with are bright albeit IMHO wrong. However there is one particular commenter that is a rather bigoted"

C-fudd is not only a bigot but he is dumber than a box of rocks. He fakes intelligence by posing himself as knowledgable on subjects he knows most people don't know anything about but when someone shows up who does he is *always* exposed for the liar he is.

Hmm. When I think back to my blog-reading habits of years past, which is trackable by saved backup bookmark files, does it mean anything that the main shift in the last decade is that Althouse *replaced* Instapundit in my surfing habits?

Actually, what we see in my bookmarks is that I've always had Kaus and Volokh, and that long ago I read Instapundit, Lileks and Andrew Sullivan. Those three are gone, Rachel Lucas and Megan McArdle came and went, Dr. Helen and Bloggingheads.tv have gotten in there and Althouse has become a mainstay.

Hmmmmmm. That latter is obviously untrue and that former at least demonstrably so.

***

bagoh20:

There used to be a number of commenters here who knew how to do that. But the last time I noticed someone even making reference to it, I'm tentatively thinking that it was chickelit (?) in the context of saying that a particular technique didn't work anymore? I could be completely wrong about that, however.

There's a post here, somewhere, in the comments of which there was an explicit explanation of how to do something like that. (There may be more, but I'm thinking of one in particular that I recall, fuzzily, and there was discussion pursuant to it in that thread.) That was the one time I actually used that technique, with reference to my own comments (as reader_iam). But that was years ago. So, useless_iam, except to suggest that you try posting your query again very high up in another thread or even emailing Althouse or Meade, who might be able to either answer your question directly or recall those commenters who did know how to do that.

shiloh: This is the third presidential election with which this blog has dealt over the years (and there have been, as well, midterms and the like). And yet you strive, because you apparently you wish, to define it as not JUST "anti-Obama" v. "pro-mittens" but more specifically as "100% anti-Obama and 100% pro-mittens? Sheesh.

I mean, I have my issues here, too, but THAT statement of yours is truly ridiculous. With all due respect, think about it. Won't you? Please.

There used to be a site that chronologically aggregated all the comments made by someone with a particular Blogger account, but that site became a paid service and has now been swallowed up by Twitter, both rendering it unavailable.

"contributors who hog the microphone, launch flame wars, smuggle hate speech into the comment page, rant about personal pet peeves repeatedly and predictably, let partisan or ideological animus run wild or otherwise abuse what at its best was a forum for reflection and thoughtful debate."

That's why you need the blogger's involvement in the comments section.

Some blogs seem to be harmed by comments, some are not. I think volokh was better before comments. Instapundit would probably get thousands of comments on every post.

Anything more than 50 or 60 is too many to keep up with and i never bother posting when there's more than 100. Who'd read it?

Althouse is on the cusp. One of the great things about this blog is that the professor's posts are often just set ups for our conversations. And she gives us a free hand, which many commenters use brilliantly. It's almost a group blog.

But with consistently 100 or more posts, it threatens to be too much. Althouse is being harmed by its own success.

Some blogs seem to be harmed by comments, some are not. I think volokh was better before comments. Instapundit would probably get thousands of comments on every post.

Anything more than 50 or 60 is too many to keep up with and i never bother posting when there's more than 100. Who'd read it?

Althouse is on the cusp. One of the great things about this blog is that the professor's posts are often just set ups for our conversations. And she gives us a free hand, which many commenters use brilliantly. It's almost a group blog.

But with consistently 100 or more posts, it threatens to be too much. Althouse is being harmed by its own success.

Tim: Do you mean your "[b]ut with consistently more than 100 posts..." to refer specifically to the political posts, or at least the posts having to do with politics? If you mean that more generally, I take issue with what you just wrote on a factual basis. And if you DO mean to refer specifically--only?--to the political posts/posts on politics, then I think you're reducing this blog to just one of its parts (even if Althouse does seem to be emphasizing that part more recently). I would be interested in reading what the proprietor herself has to say about that. Otherwise, IMO, this sort of analysis is just a morphing from "and you, a law professor!" to "and you, a serious politics commentator [who might be in danger of letting her comments section get out of control]."

I do love the conflation of Robert Cook, MadisonMan, garage mahal, and Palladian, though.

That is interesting.

Because those people--and I think each and every one of those people are actually individual people--strike me as markedly different even if one were taking only, solely, their politics, political commentary, and even their apparent philosophies into account, based on what each and every one of those individuals have written here over several years now.

But she will realize, in the comin' weeks, what a train wreck willard and Ryan truly are and have to start stating the obvious w/her blog. ok, she probably already realizes this, but did I mention she has to cater/kowtow to her super majority con flock.

btw, remember when Althouse was pissed at blogger and was ((( definitely ))) moving to a more upscale platform?

hmm, it would have cost her more $$$ and old habits are hard to break. Even for a professor!

I yield back the balance of my time to bagoh20 trying to find his posts. :D

If one remembers the "words" to their long lost post. Put althouse.com in google along w/your username name and said description and you can usually find an individual post. But if you use the same phrasing for most of your posts it could take a while. That's why it helps to be as specific as you can be w/the words.

I use it mostly to find a post some other fool may have posted inanity in the recent past. If you don't take blogging too seriously, it can be fun. :)

Tim Blair used to have a free-wheeling, you-post-it-it's-there comment section. He did have a third party blog administrator who put the hammer down occasionally when certain commenters couldn't contain themselves but it was rare. She was actually a regular commenter, as well. There was a lot of wit displayed and a lot of back and forth banter. A good time was had by all.

Then he got a new job at a major newspaper and shifted his blog over to his new employer. Now every comment has to be approved before you see it and it frequently takes hours. The immediacy of having a conversation was destroyed and it's never been the same since. If you have to wait four hours to have your "What did you mean by that?" question come through, there is essentially no real conversation. Just your turn at the mic, as someone above said.

I love the comment section but it is hard to keep up with when there are 200+ comments on a particular thread. You have no choice but to scroll through them Evelyn Wood style (wonder if she was related to Rosemary Woods?) Probabaly not as one has an s on the end and the other doesn't. Life is tough.

Technical problems. The integrated commenting (Wordpress, I think maybe) started messing up and their tech people were unable to heal it. (If you were there at the time, it stopped showing new comments, you had to do a fake addendum to the URL like ..../page3 or something like that each time you wanted to see newly-added comments.

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